Since I’m still getting hate mail that misunderstands what I think — no, I don’t want to burn every comic book — let me lay this stuff out in easy readin’ listicle format.
- Pop culture and (especially) geek culture are frequently represented by fans as disrespected and marginalized, but are commercially dominant and increasingly critically acclaimed.
- These fans claim to hate cultural disrespect for their favored properties, but they react angrily to those who dispute that it exists, and move the goalposts wildly to ensure that the notion of disrespected pop and geek culture survives.
- Traditional “high” culture faces shrinking critical attention and increasingly bleak commercial prospects, with many forms of art facing extinction as professional phenomena.
- In the pursuit of advocating for their own cultural choices, pop and geek culture fans often aggressively reject traditional high culture, frequently by questioning the motives of people who enjoy those art forms, such as insisting that we only claim to like them out of a desire to seem cultured or highbrow.
- The self-defined victimhood of fans leads to toxic behavior, such as viciously policing the boundaries of who is a real fan (“fake geek girls”) and refusing to consider their own bad behavior (#GamerGate).
- Situations like #GamerGate demonstrate the strange tension within fan victimology: the desire for mainstream coverage, acceptance, and “respect” wedded to a profound fear of losing control of the fandom to outsiders.
- That respect is an ever-receding phenomenon; there is no objective, verifiable event or condition that could convince these fans that they are properly respected.
- So in addition to the bad behavior, this self-induced victimhood just leads to vague unhappiness and bitterness during a time of utter triumph for these genres and media.
- Variety is the spice of life in all things, and the world becomes more homogenous and more boring when every big movie is a comic book movie and when there is no such thing as black box theater, opera, or experimental fiction.
- There is potential for solidarity and friendship between fans of traditional “high” and “low” culture, but we must put aside the legacy of mutual distrust and antagonism in order to create them.
- The goal should not be to weigh the competing value of various genres and mediums against each other but to foster an environment of healthy respect and equanimity for different aesthetic and artistic preferences, and to encourage a critical and commercial environment where a vast diversity of different art forms can thrive.
I’m sorry, Freddie, you’re not very good at this. You should have limited your listicle to 10 or fewer points, and you should have illustrated each one with a pop culture-derived GIF (preferably from a comic book movie adaptation). Your failure to follow the proper form just shows that you are an out-of-touch high culture snob. Nice try, though.
Harsh but fair.
1. Things can still be market dominant and low class. Fast food, coffee at Starbucks (when there are “better” shops around), etc.
2. People who were formerly marginalized like to keep their history of marginalization. This shouldn’t be particularly surprising.
3. Capitalism destroys culture, news at eleven.
4. Cultural equivalent of “acting white”.
5. Inevitable result of the primacy of identity politics over anything that matters.
6. Speaking for GamerGate in particular, it seems the obvious problem is the social-justice nature of modern reporting, the collaboration on secret email lists to push a unified message, the perception that it is impossible for those of “higher victim status” to criticize those of “lower victim status”. Even when the “higher victim status” has the full weight of a unified media juggernaut, and the “lower victim status” is some turbonerd on 4chan.
7. Congrats, you now understand how American conservatives feel about blacks.
8. See points 1 and 7.
9. Which is why it would be great if the entire “mainstream” gaming media wasn’t explicitly collaborating on news stories.
10. How optimistic!
11. See point 10.
——-
In general, it seems like people are reacting to this event in a very tribal way. Taking both sides generously: one side is worried about the toxic prior culture of gaming and wants to replace it with something better, the other is worried what a mainstream media cabal decides is something better. It’s really difficult for me to accept someone is a victim when literally the entire media establishment is supporting them, but it’s also really hard for me to care about the media establishment being corrupt and collusive as a class. It’s also really difficult for me to care about prior gaming culture.
1. But Return of the King won all the Oscars. Lev Grossman’s Magicians series was greeted by critical rapture. The New York Times prints more words on video games than on ballet. There are academic conferences on Batman and edited collections on Harry Potter. The publications that represent the American highbrow have utterly embraced these genres and mediums.
2. “Marginalization” is a word that I would prefer be reserved for actual oppression, like with racism and sexism. But either way: maintaining a history is not the same as pretending that the historical condition is still salient today. Yes, let’s bear in mind that people can be jerks to those in cultural niches. But let’s also admit that this particular niche is now the mainstream!
3. Sure, but in another sense, capitalism doesn’t do that, human choice does that. We decide if these cultures survive or not. I believe that they should survive. Because life’s more fun with more diversity. Everything being all zombies and superheroes all the time seems like a bleak, stale artistic world, to me.
4. I don’t think it’s useful to analogize race to cultural preferences.
5. Sounds about right to me.
6. Sure, but the reason people didn’t focus on those legitimate complaints is largely because of the bad behavior that came along with those complaints. If there had been more self-appraisal from the GamerGate crew, I feel like their message could have gotten out there more. On substance I agree, but you can understand why people focused on the sexism and the rage instead of the apt critiques of video game media.
7. See I would say that fan culture and racial inequality are opposites. Geeks are materially, financially dominant but complain about abstruse definitions of respect; people of color need material, economic reform but we instead treat their problems as matters of “respect.” We’ll know we’ve reached racial justice when the economic and political inequality of our society has dissolved.
8. See points 1 and 7.
9. Sure, agreed entirely.
10. Maybe!
11. Maybe! Just remember: we make the choices, here. This could happen. I’m not saying it will — it probably won’t. But I am also saying that it would be better for the fans themselves.
1. I think it’s interesting that my personal bias is still on the idea of video games as low class, maybe it’s a generational thing I haven’t grown out of or something. Intellectually I agree, emotionally I disagree, if that makes sense.
2. I suppose I should develop a better filter for what should be considered marginalization, then, since “racism” and “sexism” as defined by the media seem way too broad.
3. I agree, homogenization and universalism are terrible.
4. Why not, if race is a social construct?
6. This feels very much like that imfamous “appeal to civility”!
7. I think this is too broad. The standard insult to gamers is that they are manchildren living in their mothers basement, working a minimum wage job to spend frivolous on luxuries. The rhetoric feels the same to me as saying black people deserve their state by living in broken homes, working a minimum wage job to spend frivolously on luxuries. (I am not equating the real situations, but the perception of them!)
11. In the meta sense, this sort of fragmentation might be good at a global scale for the culture. Better than homogenization, anyways. In a selfish sense, then, I don’t want anyone to “win”. Here’s hoping no one gets hurt, though.
I agree with 90% of what you say.
The other 10% is the question of how accurate criticisms of games and comics are. For example, there’s a scene in one the Hitman games where you have to sneak past dancers at a strip club. If you kill them you lose points. Anita Sarkeesian, while critiquing the game, killed the dancers and dragged around their corpses, while smarmily explaining that the game compelled the player to treat female bodies like objects.
I’m not part of the geek sub-culture, but I’ve seen this happen again and again in the field I’m familiar with (gender) – complaints of sexism in the tech industry or comics or games that on closer inspection are empty. Gamers aren’t complaining that they’re being dissed – they’re complaining that they’re being unfairly dissed.
The critique that Anita was making here is valid; the only way to interact with those girls are either by ignoring them or killing them. Whether you like points or not is irrelevant; they exist solely to be killed.
Incorrect. They exist in order to test the players stealth skills. You are not supposed to kill or ignore them. You are supposed to dodge them. You lose points if you kill them. This kind of non-fighting sentry is common in gaming.
Also most games involve you killing dozens of usually male guards and soldiers. They exist to be killed. Does this make gaming misandric? I’d say no. Similarly, just because you’re supposed to kill female characters does not make games misogynistic.
The second paragraph is an even-if to the first. Sarkeesian is wrong about having to kill the female characters. But even if she was right that doesn’t make the game misogynistic.
They’re not guards though, they’re strippers. You don’t see the difference between killing (male or female) guards and killing scantily clad female strippers?
Also Sarkeesian isn’t calling the game misogynistic. She’s merely pointing out the fact that there is a troubling trend of sexism in video game culture, and providing dozens upon dozens of examples of it. Even if you claim this particular example isn’t valid.
One thing that Sarkeesian isn’t doing, however, is claiming that video games are low brow or that they’re all bad or anything. Her critique of games is not that they’re worthless, but the opposite: she’s arguing that they’re so powerful and valuable of a medium that they deserved to be examined and critiqued for their underlying statements and values much as art and literature are. And the fact that such discussions lead to much of the fan base lashing out as though they are a beleaguered minority is ultimately what is proving Frederick’s idea. A fan base finds it much easier to assume a persecuted status than to seriously consider and comprehend the reality of their chosen Fandom.
Non-fighting sentries can be male or female. Depending on the game they could be servants, peasants, drivers, construction workers, janitors etc. You must dodge them, or if that fails, kill them before they can raise an alarm. In this particular game they happen to be strippers. So, no. I don’t see the difference between killing female strippers in this game or a male shopkeeper in Elder Scrolls.
I’ll cease to use the word misogyny then.
The problem is that Sarkeesian provides dozens and dozens of invalid examples.
I have no doubt that there is sexism in games and comics, games and comics are made and consumed by people, and people are sexist. My favourite source of reading material on sexism in games and comics (and TV shows and movies) is a wiki called TVTropes.org:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DoubleStandard
Each sexist trope is clearly defined and dozens upon dozens of valid examples are provided. The difference between the contributors at TVTropes and Anita Sarkeesian is that tropers know and love the TV shows, movies, comics, and games they are analysing. They know the conventions of the mediums (heck, they’re cataloging these conventions!) and so they don’t make the kind of errors that Sarkeesian keeps falling into, such as confusing non-fighting sentries with targets to be optionally eliminated.
I don’t doubt that.
TVTropes is written by geeks and for geeks, and very popular in this subculture. They aren’t adverse to criticism of games and comics and are a vocal source of it themselves. What they are adverse to is people with little or no knowledge of gaming and comics making incorrect and sweeping critiques of games and comics, and of gamers themselves. This is at least partially fuelling the backlash.
I don’t think there’s a formula you can employ that will get the point across, not even a listicle composed in the most straightforward language. The trend of “geek” culture taking over pop culture began decades ago when I was a kid. “Star Wars” and “Superman” were two of the biggest movies of the 70s and that trend accelerated in the 80s. “Star Trek” started in the mid-60s and attracted so many followers that by the late 70s it was being taken seriously by the mainstream and in academia. Crude video games became widely available in the 70s and within a few years children were no longer playing outside. I don’t know when comic book boutiques first popped up in my hometown but I remember them as far back as the 80s. And on and on. So yeah, they not only won the war they won it a very long time ago, and they’re still complaining. Kind of like some elderly fellow still muttering about Pearl Harbor.
While I agree totally with your critiques of the sense of mainstream victimization, I do think you’re missing one small facet of where that victimization comes from: school.
Everybody has that experience in either high school or college of having to read a book that far too “high-brow” for their particular tastes; Shakespeare, Falkner, Hawthorne, whatever. By being forced to read and pretend to take an interest in the book through essays and the like, there is a sense instilled that this highbrow culture is better and more intellectual than the student, and that the student that struggles and doesn’t enjoy this high culture is somehow inferior.
This feeling has no bearing in the real non-academic world, of course, but I can see it as being a holdover from everyone’s collective school days.
1. That depends on how you define “geek culture”. Yes, comic books, science fiction TV series and (increasingly) big-budget games are commercially on the rise, and increasingly acceptable to be a fan of. But mostly, these are not made by “geeks”. Made for a target market centered on them, yes, but hardly by them. Of course no one thinks you’re weird for liking Doctor Who.
2. “cultural disrespect for their favored properties”? What’s that supposed to mean? When you’re talking about “properties”, it sounds like you’re already talking about the mainstreamliest of mainstream geek culture. No, I don’t think Doctor Who gets too little respect. Even if you’re talking about less mainstream “properties” (like, I don’t know, D&D? Magic the gathering?), the problem isn’t that the product is scorned. It is that people who _enjoy_ the product are scorned.
3. No argument from me there.
4. I don’t recognize this at all. Are Doctor Who fans known for their hate of classical music? No one told my Schiller-studying cellist sister, apparently… I’m pretty sure geeks don’t reject “high brow” culture any more than average.
5. I disagree with your diagnosis here. Gamergate does not “refuse to consider its own bad behavior”. Google “I support gamergate”, the top image is one very much circulated by gamergate supporters. Geek subcultures, mainstream or niche, do not have a misogyny problem.
6. I am worried that people like Leigh Alexander or Anita Sarkeesian get to influence what gets made, for much the same reason I’d worry if a fundamentalist moral crusader did. High brow or low brow has nothing to do with it, I do not consider AS anything like a representative of fine art.
7. There are some pretty easy ones. For instance, let’s have no rants dismissing your audience as fat virgin basement-dwelling neckbeards.
8. I’m pretty sure I’m not the one calling myself nasty names. This isn’t self-imposed.
9. Nobody is against diversity. One of the new gaming sites popping up in the wake of gamergate is called niche gamer. Gamergate started in the indie games scene, you know. Which is all about making genuinely original stuff. It’s also fiercely competitive (thank Markus Persson for that!). The perception was that if you made a niche, artistic game, its success would depend on who you knew, who your ideological allies were, instead of on its merits.
10. I do not think you have a very clear idea of what high art vs. low art means in the context of games.
11. Sure. But you have to do your homework. If you come from the outside and declare what’s quality “high art” in the context of computer games, you shouldn’t expect to be taken very seriously.
When MoMA did their computer game exhibit, they did their homework. They succeeded at “finding” small but hugely influential niche games like Dwarf Fortress. I don’t know anyone in gaming who disapproves of their good faith effort (although of course you can always argue the choices). The supposedly feminist cultural critics who are currently fighting gamergate, on the other hand, have not done their homework. They leave no doubt that they consider that completely unnecessary, since their audience, the aforementioned basement-dwelling virgins etc. are so far beneath them.
Hey Freddie, I appreciate this analysis. I’m a classical musician, and people tend to assume I’m either a snob or an insane person… or (usually) they simply don’t know what what kind of music I’m talking about. I’m not a snob–I just happen to practice this particular artform, and see no reason it should fall by the wayside.
A couple things. First of all: I think part of the reason people push back against your (specifically your) arguments about how there is no high-culture disrespect for geek culture is that you have a habit of alternating that with saying that pop culture is boring, overrated, etc. Sometimes you pull back into “I just mean you should vary it with some other stuff,” but not consistently. Like this one: http://fredrikdeboer.com/2014/05/14/you-laid-the-bricks-yourself/ where you alternate between saying that you and people who like Adventure Time shouldn’t judge each other’s choices, and saying that AT is twee pretentious crap.
But my bigger problem is number 4. First of all, I think you see this where it isn’t there. Like that Mallory Ortberg post where, according to you, the point was just to brag about not liking highbrow literary fiction and such, but really you get points for that. But if you look at the examples in that piece, yes, all right, Infinite Jest gets on there at the end, but only after The Wire, Game of Thrones, and a LOT of other stuff that is obviously beloved by hip internet people. In other words, it really was about admitting to not having read stuff that hip people have read.
And beyond this, I have to just cite my experience. I’m a Classicist; I think I can say without bragging that my interests are pretty traditionally highbrow. And obviously, because it’s my career, I end up mentioning to people (many of them comic-book-loving, geeky types) that I read and like this stuff. I get a variety of reactions to this (“hey, I took Latin in high school”; “that stuff has lots of lessons for our time”; “that’s useless and will never get you a job”), but I have literally never been accused of being pretentious or faking my interest. Nor has this happened with other highbrow tastes (I like Roberto Bolano, I go to plays by contemporary playwrights, some other stuff). I can’t really think of places I’ve seen it on the internet either, aside from that Adventure Time piece that you linked to. Maybe you have a particular experience where you get a lot more of this, or maybe you’re exaggerating, or a bit of both, but either way, it’s just not as much of a thing as you consistently claim.
Are you really suggesting that I’m not allowed to have my own, subjective tastes on things like Adventure Time? Do you see how far you’ve moved the goal posts, here? My personal tastes are irrelevant to the question of whether the broader culture has ambient disrespect for these genres and mediums. This is how hard you have to strain to defend the notion of disrespected pop culture: you take the existence of a single person who might not enjoy some pop culture as indicative of a culture of disrespect!
I wish you guys would just seriously ask yourselves: why are you so deeply invested in this idea? Why do you want to defend its existence in the face of all evidence? Why are you dedicated to preserving a condition that you claim to hate?
I agree with everything in your first paragraph.
But I’ve come across variants of the second paragraph elsewhere, and it is an awful debating tactic. You’re shifting from arguing that “X is false” to “why are you guys so obsessed with proving X to be true?”
I could, for example, point out that as someone who believes in social justice, you feel obliged to fight for marginalised groups. If gamers are marginalise, then you’d feel guilty when you attacked them. By establishing that they aren’t, you remove this guilt. That’s why you’re obsessed with establishing that gaming and comics are not low-status. You’d realise this is true if you asked yourself: why are you so deeply invested in this idea? Why do you defend its existence in face of all evidence.
Such an argument would, of course, be unsound and highly unfair. Which is my point.
I think I’m just doing both– I think X is true, and I’m also not sure why people get so defensive about the possibility that X is true, given that they say that they want X to be true.
Ah, okay. Fair enough. I didn’t realise that the question was sincere.
I think there are two parts to this – firstly, when you’ve built up a community or identity at least partly around the idea that you’re outsiders, the idea that you aren’t can be a threat.
Secondly, the underdog has moral worth in contemporary western culture. When you cease to be the underdog you lose those benefits. It’s the same reason that feminists are so attached to the idea that the wage gap is caused by workplace sexism.
I think one of us must be missing something. First of all, no, I have no interest in defending the “disrespected geek culture” thing. I’m not that into geek-culture myself, and I think that, as far as it goes, your point about exaggerated grievance is pretty much right.
And sure, it’s fine if you don’t like Adventure Time. (I’ve only seen it once myself, so I don’t really have a dog in that part of that fight.) I think it’s even fine to think that it’s pretentious and people who watch it are doing so for obnoxious reasons (which, I thought, was pretty clearly what you were saying.) But if that’s fine…. then what’s the problem with what people supposedly say about Tolstoy or the ballet or whatever? Are they doing something different? Or is there a reason that you’re allowed to dish it out but not take it?
Freddie – you STILL haven’t given a single convincing example of the anti-snobbery you find so pervasive. Last time I asked you linked to one article by some nobody and vaguely referred to some internet commenters somewhere. Another of your favorite lines is that the New York Times writes more about video games than ballet, which is false.
If you’re just talking about commercial dominance, fine, but what else is new? The highbrow has never been commercially dominant.
Today gamers maybe, but isn’t it the perennial arc of fashionable ethoi. I mean, once the critics are paying attention then wouldn’t it be high culture well on its way to total ossification? Like Bob Dylan’s electric guitar or trade unionism.
Posted before I remembered to say, therefor there is a fundamental conflict between the current anti-critic low culture and the currently canonized high culture, but that’s at a moment in time; over the long run, the kids grow up, the critics invade, and we become them.